UNDERSTANDING MASTER DATA MANGEMENT

Master Data Management as part of information management is a complex task and includes all strategic, organizational, methodological and technological activities in relation to the master data of a company. Its mission is to ensure the consistent, complete, current, accurate and high-quality master data to support performance processes of a company.

Master data management maintains the single view of core business entities ex: - Customers, Sites, Suppliers, employee, products which till now scattered across different application systems.
MDM handles many data types but till recently it was concentrating on customer data, mainly because it directly helps business folks for taking decision in sales and marketing process and can help in increasing sales.
Many people think MDM as technology but ifacts it’s a business application
Deploying MDM is not an option for big organization but in fact it’s a necessity, many organizations has started accepting its relevance and proactively they are going to different vendors and have started asking questions for MDM.
MDM focuses more in four departments (ETLM)

• Data consolidation (E)

Consolidating data from multiple source system and integrates into a single cleansed data store. Process wise this activity depends on business rules which varies across organization and their needs.

• Data staging (T)

Defining staging relational model where you can store the cleansed data coming from multiple business system. This step keeps only relevant master data only.

• Data propagation (L)

Sending data from staging table to data model schema tables in different ERP (Which Organization has chosen be it oracle or SAP

• Maintaining data(M)

Once data is copied to ERP MDM it’s a data librarian responsibility to maintain the data
The one thing is common among initial three stages ie Data Integration...
Data consolidation->DI->Data Staging->DI->Data Propagation
Every ERP product are now a days is web service enabled and XML being the standard for data transfer so most data integration are based on XML messages flow.
Several vendors are offering solutions for MDM and DI, including packaged ERP application vendors like SAP and oracle, infrastructure vendors like IBM and independent solution vendors like riversand and Kalido.